


The Starlit Prince

by Heavenward (PreludeInZ)



Category: Thunderbirds
Genre: And I'll promise that they're all themes that I handle as well and sensitively as I can, Angst, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, I am gonna put the big scary things up here, Manipulation, Suicidal Ideation, Suicide Attempt, This one is mostly backstory, and it's pretty damn dark, child endangerment, fairytale AU, mental health, okay
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-23
Updated: 2016-08-23
Packaged: 2018-08-10 13:06:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 16,854
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7846231
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PreludeInZ/pseuds/Heavenward
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>How Prince John came to be trapped in the library, and what he wished he could do to leave it. Mature flag is on the basis of deep discussion of some fairly heavy themes, as tagged for and noted.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. wishes and commands

**Author's Note:**

  * For [carryonstarkid](https://archiveofourown.org/users/carryonstarkid/gifts).
  * Inspired by [A Son by Any Other Name](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5635141) by [carryonstarkid](https://archiveofourown.org/users/carryonstarkid/pseuds/carryonstarkid). 



> So. This is basically the backstory for John Tracy in carryonstarkid's fairytale AU, by which this work was inspired and to whom this work is gifted. As a warning, it deals with themes of child endangerment and mental health, suicidal ideation, and a curse which causes everyone to do exactly as Scott says. If you haven't read the Fairytale AU, it's nothing that's not mentioned within the text, but is discussed in greater depth in this particular work, and I advise anyone who's vulnerable to darker themes to maybe choose another work.
> 
> For my part, I do attempt to handle these issues as well and sensitively as I can, but in the interest of prudence, this is your second warning.

Fairies aren’t what everyone thinks they are.

Or, well. They _are_ , but they’re more than that, too.

Everyone thinks they’re capricious little creatures, pure fluff and fancy, concerned with nothing but mischief. This isn’t inaccurate, it’s just an incomplete assessment. For all their whimsy and caprice, fairies are _important_ , especially in places like castles. There are a great many things that need to be done, in a castle especially, and a great many things that big people overlook.

Eos is responsible for blowing the dust into the corners of bookshelves every night, and kicking up the tiny motes to sparkle through the sunlight with the dawn every morning.

Library dust is mostly parchment, tiny flecks of leather, particles of dried ink. It’s the soot and ash from the fireplace, it’s threads and fibers of the tapestries on the wall, the deep, rich carpet. Library dust is rich, wonderful stuff, and Eos gathers it from the air and redistributes it in the places where it’ll be most potent, in the forgotten corners of forgotten shelves, left to build up and grow magical. All dust is fairy dust waiting to happen.

But for the past day, she’s been on the prowl for something far more potent, far more powerful. Fairy dust is a pittance compared to what she’s after _now_.

Because there’s a boy, dying in her library. He’s finally curled himself up on the carpet, and it’s the the third day since he first came in, all tears and grief and muddled up human emotions. He’s been the only one here for the past three days, and he just isn’t _leaving_. He’s mixed up her dusting schedule something awful, but hopefully he’ll be dead soon.

Eos has a tiny vial, a minute thing wrought from glass. It’s among her most valuable possessions, because the sort of glasswork that accommodates people who are less than six inches tall is finicky, delicate stuff. Currently the only thing it's filled with is potential, but if she’s careful and patient, and if the boy is as far gone as she thinks he is, then she’ll be able to creep down from her high shelf, across the carpet and right up to him, and fill her little bottle with his dying breath.

And _then_ she’ll be rich. Then she’ll be more than just “the library fairy”. In a tiny world where magic is currency, the dying breath of an innocent is worth it’s weight in—well. In a library fairy’s parlance, it’s worth its weight in potent metaphor.

He’s a pale boy, not more than ten years old, according to the nonsensical metric by which humans measure time. His hair is soft, red-gold and it curls above his forehead. When he’s dead, EOS is determined to take a full handful for herself, a nice hank of bright colour, to weave into a plait and work into a nice, tidy belt, to knot around the waist of her tiny tunic. She’s always wanted a belt, and the strips of leather she’s cut from the spines of books with her tiny glass knife have just never quite held up the way she expects them to.

Fairies, as a rule, don’t feel a great deal of emotion. Their brains are too small and their hearts are too busy keeping up with their wings, but a library fairy has the peculiar advantage of having spent a life steeped in human words. She can’t speak, can’t read, but she’s surrounded by words, and words are powerful. She’s surrounded by human thoughts and human stories, and there’s a sort of sympathy by osmosis that seems to have seeped into her little fairy soul.

Because from high up on the shelves, looking down, he seems like such a little thing. It must be the height that makes him look so small. There’s very little in the library that looks _small_ to EOS. He hasn’t moved in a while. There’s no food in the library, no water. She’d watched him cry until he’d spent all his tears. He hasn’t moved in quite a while.

Of course, quite a while in fairy’s parlance is only about five minutes. And while it’s true that the boy is dying, he’s still got hours to go. Currently he’s just curled up, weak with hunger and thirst, and unable to do anything but sleep.

But fairies aren’t notorious for patience, and Eos can’t stop thinking about her red-gold belt and her vial full of potential wealth and prestige. She wonders idly, as she creeps down from the high shelf, just why he hadn’t been able to leave. It’s really of no particular consequence, humans are strange and they do strange things. Having a whole room like this one, stuffed with leather and dead trees, she’s never understood _that_.

There’s a lot she doesn’t understand about humans. She especially doesn’t understand how to tell a live one from a dying one, because as she alights on the floor and creeps stealthily towards him, a pair of blue green eyes open, and freeze her where she stands.

* * *

It’s Scott’s fault, and John knows that now.

It probably would have been the thought that carried him out of the world, but for the tiny little glowing person who’d appeared in his eyeline on a chance blink, a vain effort to wet dry eyes. He wants to cry, but can’t. He wants to get up, can’t do that either. He wants to leave the library, but this, above all else, has proved impossible.

So much has been impossible lately. It’s still impossible that his mother could be gone. Their father is in the deepest throes of grief, ever since the funeral. Alan and Gordon are too tiny to know what’s happened, and Virgil wanders the halls, plaintive and lost. Immediately after the funeral, Scott had shut himself up in his room. John wishes Scott could’ve just _stayed_ shut up in his room. He’s come to the conclusion that it was the night that he came out that set everything else in motion.

It had been the dead of night, only two days past the funeral, when Scott had come barging into John’s room. Red-eyed and with wet cheeks, he’d yanked the blankets back and said, “Get up.”

And John had, because he _always_ had. Eyes rough with salt from his own dried tears, sniffling through a crusty nose, John had fumbled out of bed and blinked at his older brother, tall and gangling in his nightshirt, painted in silver and blue by the light of the moon. “What, Scotty?” he’d questioned blearily, tired and still aching with the grief that went with the waking world, where his mother would never wake again. “S’wrong?”

“You have to help me.”

Of course. No question. John’s always been willing to help his older brother. “Okay.”

Tall and straight in the moonlight, Scott had drawn himself up further still, and then he’d said, “You’re smart. You’re smarter than me. You have to go to the library. And _don’t come out_ until you figure out what happened to Mother.”

That seems like a lifetime ago, now. It’s impossible that it’s only been three days. Impossible that no one’s heard him yelling, impossible that he can’t seem to get across the threshold of the door. Impossible that his father, his brothers, his servants, impossible that they’ve _all_ forgotten him.

_I’ll tell everyone not to bother you._

Scott’s words after he’d trailed his little brother up winding stone steps, to the high tower library. It’s all been Scott. It’s always been Scott. John doesn’t know how, there’s nothing in the library to tell him how it could possibly have happened, but it’s Scott’s doing. He’s sure of that in his very soul.

It’s all just too impossible.

But now he’s staring at a tiny figure, frozen on the carpet in mid-creep. Her hair is pixie short and a bright, coppery red. Her wings are the source of a pale white light, and she’s impossibly tiny and impossibly lovely. She’s a fairy. John knows plenty of stories about fairies, because his mother had always loved to tell them. Stories about the castle fairies, and all the silly little things they did, like dotting dew onto spiderwebs, or rusting the nails that held the furniture together. Silly stories, always too silly for a serious minded boy like himself. He’d trade anything to hear one again.

On the list of things that are impossible, he prefers the impossibility of fairies to the impossibility of being trapped in the library.

His voice is a papery rasp, a whisper of dry air over cracked lips as he twitches his fingers in her direction and asks, “Are you real?”

No answer. A nervous flutter of wings, but no words. John wonders if he’d hear them, if her voice is as tiny as the rest of her. She’s barely four inches tall, and she’s still a few feet away. She can’t be real. His eyes close again and he sighs, deep and slow.

He opens them again to the touch of a tiny hand on his nose and he gasps, startled, but not as startled as she is, because he watches her jump, leaping backwards into the air and hooking her ankle on the fingers of the hand nearest his face, and she falls, sprawling in the thick plush of the carpet.

In spite of everything, the look of shocked indignation on her tiny, porcelain face is enough to get John to giggle, weakly. It’s barely more than a stuttering intake of breath, but it’s the first time anything’s been funny in what feels like a lifetime.

And she smiles. It’s impossible, but she smiles and sticks her tongue out at him, crinkles her tiny nose and grins. Then she puts her hands on her tiny hips, and looks up at him with a rather critical expression.

“Can…can you help?” John asks, barely a whisper. “Please, I can’t get out. Could…you. You could get someone. You could get someone to come. D-did my mother send you? She always said there were fairies. Please, please help. I don’t know what’s wrong and I j-just—I n-need _help_.”

This gets a shrug, and the tiny fairy drops down to sit in the carpet’s thick pile, up to her ankles. She pulls a tiny shard of glass from a tiny pouch slung over her shoulders, and begins to saw up fibers of the carpet, apparently ignoring him.

John’s fingers clench in the carpet and he manages to lift his head, to peer down at the fairy with his whole body trembling, aching for food and water and for someone to remember he exists. “ _Please_. Please, I’ll—I’ll do anything. Anything you want, I _promise_. Please, please j-just go get my brother. O-or my father—someone, _anyone_.”

The room’s getting blurry as the sprite gets to her feet, grinning again. She nods once, decisive, and then there’s a bright flare of her glimmering wings as she hefts her knife. In a literal twinkling, she’s standing on his shoulder, and then her foot hits the top of his ear as she climbs on top of his head, pulls up a handful of his own ginger hair. There’s a soft sawing sound, and then she darts away.

It’s not wise to make contracts with fairies. John’s heard enough stories to know that. But he doesn’t know what else he could have done. His head is spinning and he’s weak; weak and so _tired_. His forehead thuds heavily against the carpet as his face drops again, and with a shuddering sigh, the world fades away.

* * *

He hadn’t meant to forget about John.

John’s always been his best friend, always been the one Scott relies on. John’s just—he’s _dependable_. He’s always there, he’s always willing to help. This wasn’t supposed to be any different. Scott had needed an answer to a question he couldn’t ask, and well, John’s always been the one to give him the answers before.

Everyone knows the stories about the castle fairies. Virgil’s always claiming to have seen them out in the gardens. Scott had always disdained the notion, until one of them had wriggled under the gap beneath his bedroom door, and fluttered up and onto the cover of his bed. This one had brought him a lock of his brother’s hair—a token? A trophy? A reminder. She’d waved the lock of hair in his face and stomped her little foot, and then she’d gone flitting away to the doorway, and Scott had remembered.

It’s been three days since Scott’s seen his brother. He hadn’t even thought to check on him. It’s not his fault, _everyone’s_ been leaving John alone. It’s what he seems to want, tied up in his own little knot of grief, he doesn’t want to be talked to or bothered. He’d shut himself up in his bedroom, much the same way Scott had, only appearing at mealtimes.

John hasn’t turned up at any of the meals Scott’s been to.

With his feet pounding up the stairs to the library, he realizes it’s been _days_ since he’s seen his brother. His mind is racing with waking nightmares, John trapped under a fallen shelf, or suddenly sick like their mother had been. John not in the library at _all_ , but kidnapped or stolen away. Trailing after the afterimage of a line of white light, blurring up the stairs, Scott’s still feeling the pressure of his heart in his throat as he bursts in the library door.

No toppled shelves. No shattered window where a wizard might have broken in. Nothing but silence and—

It’s to Scott’s credit that upon the sight of his brother—curled up and deathly still on the carpet in front of the hearth—he runs towards him instead of away.

He’s a year older. A year is barely enough to matter, really, though it tells in their personalities that Scott’s the older brother. He’s still only eleven. He’s too young to have lost his mother, and too young to go stumbling to his knees on the carpet beside the crumpled figure of his closest brother.

“John?” His hands clasp narrow shoulders, and shake the younger boy. Scott shoves him over onto his side, rolling him off his stomach onto his back. John’s face is pale and his eyes are shadowed, his lips dry and cracked. Scott can’t quite tell if he’s breathing, so he shakes him again. “Johnny? Johnny, wake up. Wake up _now_.”

And John does. There’s a raggedy gasp and his eyes snap open, but John’s still not answering, just looking up at him blankly. Scott’s still frightened. “What’s wrong? Tell me what’s wrong.”

It takes a moment for his little brother to muster his voice, and there’s a soft, pained sound when he first tries to talk. Then a stutter, a false start, and then, whispered, “You did it. You s-said I had to stay. Now I can’t get out.”

This sets a cold feeling rising along Scott’s spine, even as John shudders weakly beneath his hands. “What? No. I didn’t—this isn’t _my_ fault. What d’you mean you can’t get out? Of course you can get out.”

“I _can’t_ ,” John tells him, plaintive and with his fingers fumbling, clinging at Scott’s sleeve. “I tried. I shouted but nobody came. It’s like everybody forgot about me. Y-you said I…I couldn’t come out until I found out what happened to…t-to Mother. I don’t know. I don’t _know_. Please, h-help. I’m hungry.”

“You can get out. Get up and try.”

The cry of protest that tears its way out of his brother is like nothing Scott’s ever heard before. But John does it. Weak and faltering, he forces himself to sit up. Scott watches him uncurl trembling limbs and start to make his way towards the door on his hands and knees. And he tries. Scott watches him, transfixed, as he _tries_. But trying isn’t succeeding, and when his brother reaches the open doorway, something seems to catch him, to hold him back from the threshold. John’s sobbing weakly—though it’s just a soft, papery sound, with no actual tears—by the time Scott realizes that it’s true.

“Stop,” he orders, his own throat dry and the words whispered as he scrambles to his feet. John crumples on the floor again, this time on hard bare stone and not the plush carpet in front of the fireplace. Three days. Three days, trapped and alone. _I’m hungry_. Scott’s been frozen from the inside out and he crosses the room to his brother’s side more swiftly and with greater purpose than most eleven-year-olds possess. He gathers John up, pulls his little brother back over to the fireplace, and settles him back down on the couch. “Wait here,” he says, as though John can do anything else. There’s no answer from the redhead, but Scott’s gaze falls upon the fairy, whose perched on the mantlepiece, watching the whole encounter.

“Hey. You. Look after him,” Scott commands, even as he turns on his heel on the carpet, and bolts out the door. And without knowing why, the tiny creature will.

Scott runs to the kitchens. He demands bread and milk and honey, an apple or three, a hunk of buttery yellow cheese. He’s given what he wants, no questions asked, except the ones that are silently being asked by Scott himself, wondering if anyone has _ever_ denied him something he’d asked for. He doesn’t tell anyone about John, he just runs back upstairs with his haul, and gently coaxes his brother into eating, little sips of cool water at first, carefully suggested. He dips torn of squares of bread in honey-sweetened milk, until John can wet his throat enough to swallow pieces dry, and starts to eat in earnest.

There are a million questions filling the library, almost all of them Scott’s, but the boys just sit in silence, as the younger of them claws his way back from the edge of starvation. The tiny fairy Scott had ordered into guardianship sits on John’s knee, and he shyly offers her crumbs of bread, which she takes and crams into her tiny face with relish. There’s a ghost of a smile on John’s pale face, watching her, and Scott watches him, somber, with questions beating inside his chest.

The only one he’d asked of John is the question John can never know the answer to—the question Scott had asked to trap him, without meaning to. Scott doesn’t _know_ what happened to their mother. John, as long as he’s bound to the library, mustn’t either.

But Scott’s slowly growing certain that it was some misspoken word, something _he’d_ said. He can’t remember the words. But he remembers standing in his mother’s sick room, with hot tears in his eyes, and shouting at her. It was something awful, something horrible and angry and childish, to accuse his mother of. To charge her with the words:

_You’ll never get better. Never._


	2. soft the fall of dust

She doesn’t know why she cares so much, doesn’t know that she’s just as cursed as he is. It’s notoriously tricky to curse the fae, as magic slips and slides off their skins like dew off rose petals. If Scott had tried to curse her on purpose, it wouldn’t have landed. But offhandedly, with his brother’s welfare close to his heart, all those years ago. The words _look after him_ had been written into Eos’ tiny soul, and it had suddenly been all she’d _wanted_ to do. It’s tremendously difficult to get a fairy to do anything she doesn’t _want_ to do.

The same single-mindedness has her beating her fists against glass that’s as thick as her arm. She’s already thrown herself against the walls of her prison, succeeded only in battering her wings and bruising her lightly glowing skin.

There’s a boy dying on the floor of her library again.

Only he’s not a boy any longer, but nearly twenty-one, practically a man grown. And he’s a bit more determined about it than he was last time, because he’s trapped her beneath a glass jar on one of the highest shelves in the library, and she can’t do anything but watch. She certainly can’t do anything to help, though it’s all she’s done for the past decade.

A decade is nothing to a fairy. But from where she sits on the shelf, watching the way she always has, it looks like it might be half a lifetime for John. And too short and too lonely a life it’s been, though she’s done her very best to at least keep the loneliness at bay.

Eos hadn’t known to be surprised, but at first it had been surprising how quickly the boy had become resigned to it. On his brother’s orders, food had been brought up, blankets, chamberpots, all rotated through day by day. Servants came and went and the mutterings behind hands were all about how sad it was, the poor young prince, so stricken by grief that he’d confined himself to the library. John had never said otherwise. No one had any reason to believe he _hadn’t_ gone a little bit mad, and that he was better left alone.

And so he was.

For the first few days—weeks, even—he’d continued to try the door, continued to try and trick his way through it. Coming at it sideways, walking backwards, falling through it. None of it had ever worked. Eventually he’d exhausted his options.

After the door it had been a question of the window, five storeys up though it is. It faces the sea and the wind off the ocean has rimed it thick with salt, so that light passes through, but no sight of the world outside. Leaded into the space in the wall, solid as a rock. The library, in addition to books, is full of all manner of curious artifacts. So John had tried to throw a chunk of amethyst the size of his head through the window glass. 

It had bounced off, as though the glass was as solid as the stone walls around it, and the heavy crystal had hit the floor and shattered.

There’d been tears after that, but not many, and not for long. EOS had helped him pick pieces of purple crystal off the floor, squirreling away some of the nicer, clearer chunks of rock, and picking a lucky one to carry about her person.

After that, he’d started to read. He read and read and just kept reading, scratching notes onto parchment in a neat, if childish hand, while the world went on without him. That first year hadn’t been so bad.

The summer that followed had brought The Girl.

The Girl had come sailing into the library, skirts swishing around her ankles and startling John amidst the stacks. Eos would discover that her name was Princess Penelope, and that it just wouldn’t do for John to spend the whole summer alone in the library. But rather than trying to drag him out—either due to foreknowledge or just sensitivity—she had dropped onto the carpet in front of the fireplace with a floomph of her skirts, and demanded that John bring her something worth reading, if they were going to be spending the summer cooped up in the library _together_.

So The Girl wasn’t so bad. A flightier fairy than Eos might have been jealous, but her entire tiny existence has devoted itself to John’s well-being. And it had been nice, for the first time in almost a year, to see John with a real friend.

But summers weren’t forever, and it wasn’t as though she could spend her every sunlit summer hour in the library. Mostly she turned up after dark, after the sun had set on a long day of riding and hawking and hunting with John’s brothers. In her absence, John explained—nominally for Eos’ benefit, though her interest in affairs of state was best described as utterly and completely nonexistent—that Penelope’s presence was mostly diplomatic. Emblematic of friendship between their respective kingdoms. Really not a big deal.

By the close of his second year in the library, John had read the last page of the last book. By the close of the third, he’d pulled everything down from the shelves and reorganized it, made it make more sense. He’d done it again six months later, convinced there was a better system to be found. As often as the books were on the shelves, they were sorted in teetering towers as tall as John was, though John grew taller and skinnier every year.

After a while, someone other than Eos seemed to take note of this tallness and its associated skinniness, and Scott started to turn up, with two blunted practice swords in hand, to drill with his younger brother. If occasionally these fights got rather fiercer, rather wilder than they needed to be—if occasionally John’s temper rained down in blows that his brother could’ve blocked and didn’t—neither of them said so.

Fourteen, fifteen, sixteen. He’d read all the books through another two times, though he reads faster than most people believe possible. Anyone who comes to the library looking for answers only has to ask them of the pale, red-haired prince who sits among the books. If he can’t answer a query offhand, he can point to the book where the answer _is_. Eos fetches them for him, a bright little light, stronger than she looks, ferrying books across the library.

The only question he’s failed to answer in all these years is the question that Scott had set before him.

The books have been no help. Truthfully, the books are mostly awful. There are a few rare treasures among the shelves, and John and Eos both know where and what these are, but for the most part, they’re dry and only good for dust. Not even their dust is very compelling, though Eos still has her duties and she still goes about them. Most of the books are boring, useless to him, and he’s read them cover to cover enough times to know. They’re books of war and politics, books for a king. 

John’s not a king and never will be, and it takes him an embarrassingly long time to realize that while the library’s his lot, the books inside it aren’t. By the time he turns eighteen, he’s thrown most of the books out of the library. The _books_ sail easily through the door, and for all that he’s not nearly as strong as a hale and healthy young man should be, John’s got a good arm when there are four hundred pages that need to be pitched down a hallway.

It’s Gordon he plies with requests for rare volumes, books referenced in other books, authors he’s only read of. Tomes and texts and treatises, epitaphs and engravings. The world within the library walls is limited, but there are ways to get past that. It’s Penny who carries his neatly written lists down to the docks, to be given to his brother. He sees less of Scott than he should, less of Virgil than he needs to, and Alan’s nocturnal. John is too, mostly, but apparently their waking hours are better spent on their own projects than in each others company.

Seventeen, eighteen, nineteen. It’s hard to keep his hopes up. He talks to her less often than he did, talks to the empty room around him instead. Eos can see his spirit slowly dimming, the way that maybe big people can’t, actually. There’s light about most people, if you look at them sideways. Auras are real things, and John’s is fading. There’s a paleness about him, a sort of washed out quality. He looks _dusty_. Maybe he is. Eos knows better than anyone just how much dust there is in the library air. It’s gotten into every part of him, in his hair, his lungs, coating his skin. Fading him.

He disdains most company. He’ll tolerate his servants, but if he misses his brothers, he doesn’t act like it. There are new books every day. There are books Eos won’t touch, dark volumes of magic that shouldn’t be trifled with. It’s her obvious aversion that keeps him from delving too deeply, though the tomes don’t _leave_ the library. They just stack up in a dark corner, too sinister even to gather any dust.

And now twenty, almost twenty-one. And dying on the library floor.

It’s been a day just like any other, maybe a bit better than most. It’s summer. The Girl is here, though she’s almost A Woman now. She’s seventeen, almost eighteen. Willow slender, hair like spun gold and eyes like diamonds. Still good and kind and a dearer friend to John than anyone else is, when his brothers are lost to the crown and the forest and the sea and the sky. When she’s gone, John writes her letters, though he doesn’t send nearly as many as he writes. Eos dips her hands in the inkwell and paints tiny pictures in the margins. More than half of them feed the fire every night. Just more dust.

He’s written her one last letter now, with no pictures to speak of, and it’s on the shelf behind Eos’ little glass prison. In the morning, the Girl will come in to have her breakfast with John, the way she has every summer for a decade now. She’ll find the chimney stopped up with the curtains from around the bed, and the fire banked low into embers meant to burn all night, to choke all the air from the room. She’ll find John the way Eos had found him so long ago, pale and small and alone. Just like Eos, she’ll have missed his dying breath. And she’ll find Eos, and find that she’s failed.

Fairies don’t cry. But neither do fairies devote their entire being to the care and guardianship of cursed princes in libraries. And as her tiny fists beat against the glass, there’s an command that echoes all through Eos’ heart and soul, the mandate she’d never asked for. 

_Look after him._

Fairies don’t cry. And _this_ fairy doesn’t fail.

* * *

**Okay, really, REALLY explicit discussion of suicide/suicidal ideation. This is the warning.**

This, at least, isn’t Scott’s fault. Not really. John had been quite sure to forgive Scott, before settling on this last course of action. 

There’s always been a way out, after all. He’s known that for _years_.

The room is dark, but for the embers of the fire. He’s banked it low, fed it well, and it burns hot, nearly smokeless. There’s a dim haze in the room, but the wood is dry and clean, and veins of bright red and gold glow along the smoldering white undersides of the logs. It’s hot. Especially curled on his side, right in front of the fire as heat rises in the air and fills the room, it’s almost unbearably hot. His mouth is dry and his head pounds, pulses dizzily with pain.

It’s taking longer and it’s not as painless as he’d expected. Still. By this point he doesn’t think he can get up any longer, and the drowsiness is slowly starting to wear the edges off the pain in his head, the tightness in his chest. It’s oh so slowly starting to ease. He can’t even hear the tiny sound of Eos, beating her fists against the glass he’s trapped her beneath. That had been _far_ too easy. She trusts him. It’s for her own good. It’s a large jar, the air beneath it is clean, and fairies breathe precious little. She’ll be safe until morning. By morning it’ll all be over and done with.

John’s reasonably certain that he’s made his peace with everyone who might require it. Everyone but Penelope, because he’s convinced himself she wouldn’t understand. All those letters he’d thrown to the fire, trying to tell her the truth. Maybe it’s just that he could never stand the thought of her actually reading the words, couldn’t stand the thought of her hand flying to her mouth, tears springing into her eyes, guilt flooding her heart.

_I hate it here. I can’t do it any longer. I want to die._

It had always been just a little too explicit. Every time he’d put the words to paper, he’d had to tear them up, throw them away, burn the evidence. It’s a truth he’s hiding from everyone, himself included. What’s brought it to light, on this day of all days, had seemed so innocent at first.

Because it’s Eos. All these years, and she’s been with him since the night he’d first found out the truth about what Scott had done. He’d never really thought about it before, just what had made her decide to stay. For the longest time, he’d just assumed it was the promise he’d made, to do whatever she’d asked of him. Only eventually he’d realized—she never really _did_ ask for anything. But Eos doesn’t count; she doesn’t even realize she’s been trapped. It had been such an innocuous thing to discover, something Scott had mentioned offhand. Something he doesn’t even seem to realize is a problem, the fact that he’s enslaved a tiny soul, bound her to John’s existence. If the eldest hadn’t decided that today was a day to join him and Penelope for breakfast, it wouldn’t even have been said.

_It’s a good thing I told her to look after you. Sometimes I think you’d forget to eat if she didn’t get hungry too._

It’s such a small thing, just like she is.

And yet, it’s everything. It’s what Scott’s done, writ large, the broad strokes of the curse painting over the entire life of an innocent creature, who would otherwise be free and unbound. It’s not as though she’s unhappy. Honestly, it’s not even as though she seems to realize that she’s been trapped, just the same as John has. She’s a library fairy. He’s seen her about her business, seen the complicated little rituals she performs, moving dust around the room. It’s possible that she’d still be here anyway, that she’d have spent the whole decade here of her own free will. But that’s not what _matters_. The fact that she doesn’t have a choice—that’s what matters. And what matters is that it had kept John awake, staring at the ceiling overhead. Wondering what it would take to free her.

John doesn’t bother with the bed very often. More often than not he falls asleep reading, and he doesn’t read in bed. He reads on the carpet in front of the fire, or at the desk. He reads with his back against the cool exterior wall, that bare patch beneath the window. He reads until he can’t keep his eyes open, and then he drops out of the world, escapes the library the only way he can. He dreams of the world he remembers, the world beyond the door. He dreams best when sleep comes upon him suddenly, and he’s not sure he could do without the dreams.

Climbing into bed implies purpose, and for years, that’s been missing from John’s life. His bed is comfortable, but he’d done nothing but lie awake, thinking of Eos and what Scott had said. He almost hadn’t meant to get up, though he’d been numb with purpose once he had.

He’d gone to his desk. He’d written a letter. Hardly the first letter of its kind. He’d watched the ink dry with thunder rumbling through the window behind him, and then he’d taken it to the cold, empty hearth. If there’d already been a fire burning, maybe he would have thrown the envelope to the flames, and been done with it. Instead, he’d set it high upon one of the shelves, and then turned back to the fireplace.

It’s not like he hasn’t thought about it. There’s very little to do in the world of these walls but think. John’s grown tremendously tired of thinking.

So a hot, high fire, coaxed into belching all its smoke up the chimney, until it burnt clean, and then eased back down into embers. And then curtains up the chimney, a blanket stuffed into the crack beneath the door. Eos, tricked into her trap.

And now the room growing hotter and stuffier, sweat clinging to his skin, sticking his nightshirt to his back, his chest. He’d pulled on a pair of woolen breeches when he’d climbed out of bed. The air is thick, heavy in his lungs, and the room darkens even as the embers stay bright on the hearth. John doesn’t notice as his eyes fall closed, with the afterimage of cherry red coals, seared behind his eyes. His last thoughts are muddled, weak things, part sorrow, part weariness, part a long standing wish to die.

The last thing he knows for certain is quiet gratitude, that he’s finally found his way out.


	3. crown of silver, crown of gold

It’s the night to follow a dim summer day, heavy and oppressive, threatening rain. After breakfast in the library with John, Scott had offered her his arm, and then there’d been talk between with Virgil of taking the hounds out for a run. If they _had_ gone, the Princess would have plaited her hair and traded her skirts for breeches and joined them. But none of their informal trio were particularly in the mood to be soaked to the skin, and they’d dithered away the morning in debate about the likelihood of rain, though the storm had held off until just after sundown. Penelope had abandoned Scott and Virgil shortly after lunch.

Gordon and Alan have been engaged for the past week with a model of the castle, built to scale in the courtyard. There had been a great deal of fretting and fussing and undue worry over the structure, and sheets of sailcloth had been scavenged from the boathouse, pinned up and tented over the bulk of it, with its mortar still damp and its towers precarious. Penelope had pretended to take an academic interest, and initially refrained from getting her hands dirty. But as the sky grew darker and more oppressive and distant thunder rumbled, she’d joined in the frantic attempts to keep the castle safe, battening down sailcloth and helping the two youngest brothers—well, mostly Gordon, as Alan is only ten and emphatically his fifteen year old brother’s henchman—protect their creation.

She’s not sure what wakes her. Not sure what keeps her from falling back to sleep. Maybe it’s the sound of the sea and the storm and the way the wind howls against the wall, so different to the sounds in her bedroom at home. In her chambers in _her_ castle, her room faces an inner courtyard with a small orchard inside, and the only sounds are soft wind through fruit trees, or the songs of nightingales. 

The Tracys’ castle is a harder, harsher place, and while she loves it for its regality, its rugged shoulders and craggy walls, the way it fronts the sea—her own home is a gentler one.

So perhaps it’s the wildness of the night that keeps her awake, sets unease rising in her chest. Something about the darkness feels evil and unkind, and has her thinking about what the next morning will bring. And abruptly she realizes what her day’s been missing. 

There’s plenty to tell John about today. She always finds _something_ , finds a way to make him feel a part of the life outside his door. Where everyone else has been content to assume that he _wants_ to be walled off and isolated, Penelope’s always stubbornly involved him in the day to day mundanity of her life. He’ll want to hear about Gordon and Alan’s castle, especially. Penelope wishes the library didn’t face the sea, but the courtyard instead. The storm howls outside, but tonight is a night for soft voices and quiet talks about meaningful things, the things she loves best when she can talk about them with John.

It’s the pang of guilt that has her throw back the blankets and climb out of bed. She pulls a dressing gown over her nightdress and lights a candle from her bedside. Servants out and about the hallways at night may see her, but she hasn’t ever cared. It’s hardly the first time she’s been to the library after dark. If there are rumors about what she _does_ in the library after dark, they’re never repeated in her presence.

The truth is it’s always been perfectly innocent, a friendship in the very purest sense possible. Fairly early on in their acquaintance, as a precocious six-year-old trying to get an eight-year-old John to step up his game, she had declared that if she _had_ to marry one of his brothers, she _certainly_ wouldn’t be marrying _him_ , and that he’d _better not_ try and court her.

He’d taken it at face value, the plot had backfired, and Penelope had gained a friend and a confidant. When Virgil pulled her hair or Scott put mud down the front of her dress, John was always on her side. If one day he would be her brother by law, then before that John was her brother by choice, and by deep love and affection. The pair of them had two inseparable summers, and she might _just_ have reconsidered marrying him, if not for the death of the Queen.

Everyone says it’s _such_ a shame that the shock of his mother’s loss had sent the poor young prince out of his mind.

Penelope’s known for years that John’s not mad, but it’s not what’s whispered in the halls of her father’s castle. That one of the King’s sons had lost his sanity to grief and shut himself up in a tower library—well. At least it’s not the crown prince, the better prospect. At least it narrows the field. It had been another of their late nights in the library, not really that long ago, when John had finally told her the truth.

The truth is worse, anyway. Or at least, she’s always supposed so, but then again, perhaps not. Perhaps a curse is better than going mad. Penelope’s never thought to ask John directly. It’s an unkind thing to make him think about, whether he would’ve preferred to lose his mind, though she doesn’t doubt he’s thought of it before. She shudders a little at the very question. 

But tonight’s not the night for it. Tonight’s too cruel and dark already, tonight’s a night for questions about minds and hearts and their long friendship. It’s a night for “do you remembers” and telling each other stories about the childhood they shared. That’s the sort of thing a night like this calls for. 

It’s not far to the library tower, and she takes the spiralling stairs in her bare feet. It’s a fact of building a castle by the sea that the stones will always be cold to the touch and feel damp on bare skin, but she walks quickly. She pauses to light the sconces that hang above the stairway as she climbs, on the off-chance that she needs to make her way back down before dawn. More than likely she’ll spend the night, but it never hurts to be cautious. 

There’s no light beneath the door at the top of the tower landing, but that may not mean anything. Possibly John’s just let the fire burn down again, and she’ll find him hunched over his desk with a lantern burning bright on the page, but not bright enough to reach the door. The way the shadows in the stairwell creep and crawl up her spine is nothing but late-night nerves, that anxiousness in the dark that she’s never quite outgrown.

Penelope’s hands always feel small against the massive iron ring set in the middle of the door, and it seems heavier than usual as she pulls it open—and the blast of heat that swells out the door is enough that she takes a step back, blinking.

Even past dark, even if her steps through the dark hallways are hurried, the library at the end of her short journey is usually a bastion of peace and safety. Tonight it’s as dark and threatening as anywhere else, except for the banked fire on the hearth, glowing low and red. The room is close, stuffy and oppressive as she steps over the threshold. Her feet tangle against soft fabric and she looks down at a heavy woollen blanket, incongruously placed at the foot of the door.

Her steps across the library floor are quick, even before she realizes why. There’s a visible haze in the air and the smoke has her coughing, choking a bit as she recognizes the shadow, silhouetted in front of the cherry red mouth of the hearth. It’s hardly the first time. The carpet is deep and plush, and they’ve _both_ dropped off it front of it. 

Her and John, nine and eleven, and sprawled on their stomachs with a big illuminated atlas, reading about the great wide world, too young for that to be as sad as it really was. Or eleven and thirteen, duelling each other into peals and tears of laughter with the very worst poetry they could find on the shelves, read as theatrically as possible. Fourteen and sixteen, back to back in front of the fire, with a blonde head leaning back against a narrow shoulder, melodramatically lamenting the choice between Scott and Virgil, and getting the dry-as-dust suggestion of Gordon in response. 

Eighteen and twenty, and Penelope’s knees hitting the carpet, fumbling the candle she’d carried up from her chambers, nearly dropping it before managing to set it on the floor. Its small golden light swallowed by the deep red of the dying fire. Her hands tremble as she catches John’s shoulders, shakes him. This is too still for sleep. Before she can manage his name, her lungs spasm again, and her coughing is louder than her voice would be. Her breath comes in fits and snatches and she finally whispers, “John?”

Not that it wakes him. The light’s all wrong, ruddy and dim, and the shadows find the hollow places where his cheeks have grown gaunt, find the bruise-dark places beneath his eyes, the tracery of blue veins in his eyelids. The room is hot, literally stifling, and the sheen of sweat on his forehead looks like blood, sets her heart pounding. One of Penelope’s hands finds one of John’s, fingers threading between his and feeling the faintest twitch of his hand in hers.

“John, _stop this_ ,” she hisses, even on her knees, she’s every inch the queen she was born to be and her voice is stern, commanding. “You _can’t_ , I won’t allow it.” Another rough shake of his shoulders and then her hand leaves his, catches his face. This lingers only a moment before she slaps him, sharply, so her fingers and palm are set stinging with the impact.

That gets a soft groan, but nothing further, and Penelope nearly screams at him in fear and frustration.

Then from a high, unseen shelf, another light flares and Penelope’s gaze jerks upward. Tiny and trapped beneath a glass jar, there’s the library fairy, beating her fists against the inside of her improvised prison. Penelope’s on her feet and across the library in moments, but she still has to strain to the very limit of her height to reach the bottom lip of the jar and tip it to the edge. Before she’s even pulled it all the way clear of the shelf, Eos has slipped out the bottom and darted across the darkness of the library, a shooting star in the dark.

Eos lands on John’s chest and immediately flings her tiny self into a sobbing, trembling heap. Her wings flutter and flicker in distress and Penelope has to stop herself from roughly snatching the little creature. Instead she drops to her knees again and holds a hand out. “No, listen! Listen, _please_ , you daft little thing. His _brother_. Please, you must go and fetch Scott, and I’ll do what I can here. The air’s gone bad, you’ll choke to death and he’d never forgive me. _Go_.”

* * *

Scott can feel the heat from the library almost as soon as he reaches the landing, the door hanging wide open, though the room is dark. Scott snatches one of the candles off a sconce on the wall, holds it high as he crosses the threshold.

Her charge delivered, Eos darts away from him, an arc of white light. Where she lands, her glow illuminates a little tableau before the hearth, the Princess Penelope’s tear-streaked face bowed above John’s perfect stillness. She’s pulled him up off the carpet, so he’s halfway lying against her, his face against her shoulder, her arms wrapped around his chest. Against the white of her nightdress, the candlelight washes out the red and finds all the gold in his hair, a princely crown.

Only it’s not John Scott’s staring at.

It’s the wrong moment for it, but Scott finds himself stricken, transfixed by how beautiful _she_ is, exquisite in heartbreak. Of course she’s always _been_ beautiful. No one would deny that the Princess is beautiful, but it’s always such carefully composed beauty, a living portrait of The Girl as A Lady. Scott’s never seen her like this, with her golden hair loose around her shoulders, no artful arch to her eyebrows, no ever-present rosebud smile. Just the very purest version of herself, broken with grief. And beautiful enough to draw attention away from Scott’s brother, dying in her arms.

Scott’s never known how John could stand it to begin with, but apparently he hadn’t been able to stand it any longer. Perhaps, standing helplessly before his brother and his dearest friend, with dread in his heart and white light in his eyes, perhaps this is one of the first times John’s _ever_ made any sense to Scott.

After all, if it had been _Scott_ trapped in the tower library, he would have wanted to die far sooner than this.

There’s so much about John that just never made sense. Why he’d been such a quiet, submissive little boy, why he’d always followed Scott everywhere he went, did everything he said. It was _useful_ , but it never made any damn sense. 

At least, not until the day it did.

Scott’s always gotten what he asks for. He very rarely gets what he _wants_. But maybe, at least right now, those two things can be one and the same. His whole body straightens and the command comes more easily than it should.

“John, _don’t_.” 

_Don’t die_ , is what he means. Penelope lifts her face to stare at him, startled, even as Scott crosses the room, drops to his knees on the rug in front of the fireplace. The candle he’s carried joins hers on the stone hearth. The ashes of a fire are smothered by a thick, heavy curtain, and up close he can see Penelope’s hands are stained with soot. She must have pulled it out of the chimney, snuffed out the fire. It’s a clever method for an execution. It’s frighteningly clever, exactly the sort of thing that Scott would never have thought of. 

But then—even in the very blackest depths of his own curse, Scott’s never wanted to die. Even if it would put everything else right, Scott’s never been brave enough—or is it cowardly enough?—to try and take his own life.

It _has_ to be cowardice. That’s the only way he’ll be able to do what needs to be done, if he tells himself that his brother is too much of a coward to find the strength himself. John can’t _do this_. Scott won’t permit it. So he blinks back furious tears, and his hands grab two fistfuls of John’s shirt, pull him away from the princess. John’s nothing but dead weight, with his face against Scott’s shoulder, and rest of him slumped against his elder brother’s chest. “Don’t die. I won’t have you weighing any heavier on my conscience, John, I _won’t_. _You_ can’t be my fault too,” Scott mutters, and he has to seize hold of the sudden fit of anger, has to make it work for him. The anger in his heart tempers the command, turns it to steel. “Wake up.”

Penelope finds her voice, but only barely and her ashy fingers reach out to cling to John’s shirt, desperate for contact. “He won’t. I tried, I…he’s breathing, still, but only just and he wouldn’t wake, not for anything. I can’t—I couldn’t—is…is he gone? Scott, please don’t let him be _gone_.” The tears that gleam in her eyes start to fall in earnest and she barely manages to stifle a wail, choking it into a sob. “Oh, John—oh, p- _please_ …”

“ _Wake. Up_.” Scott puts his every last ounce of will behind the command, and he gets what he wants. John may not want it, but Scott does. So the force of pure purpose drags his brother back to the hazy border of consciousness. John washes up on the shores of awareness with a barely audible groan, a shuddering intake of breath, and then faint, feeble coughing. When Scott grabs his shoulders and pushes him upright for a better look at unfocused green eyes beneath flickering eyelids, John summons up just enough strength at the sight of his elder brother to try to pull away with a whimper. 

Fine. 

“Oh!” Penelope’s exclamation is soft and Scott lets his brother fall back against her as she rises to her knees. “ _Dearest_. Dearest heart, oh _John_ …please, please stay with me. Please don’t do this, _please_ —I’m sorry. I’m so sorry I didn’t know—“

She can beg and plead all she likes, it won’t change the world to fit her wishes. 

But Scott’s wishes are of a different sort. 

John’s made it hot as hell in here, befittingly. Scott’s gone ice cold in the heat of the darkened library and he gets to his feet, crosses the room to the single window, leaded firmly in the stone, rimed with thick salt from the spray of the wind off the sea. Outside the last of a summer storm has spent itself, released the heat of the day to be swept away with the wind. Scott casts about only briefly before he seizes the back of the chair by John’s desk, hefts it easily, and then rams it into the window.

Glass shatters and maybe Penelope cries out again, as wind sweeps into the room, gusting cold through the oppressive heat. Moonlight filters through the tattered remains of storm clouds, and casts a long rectangle of silver into the room. The coolness of the air only serves to invigorate Scott and he sets the chair down, pushes it flush against the wall below the window.

He turns on his heel, back towards the prince and princess. Scott’s not been crowned into his father’s place. Not yet, not even after all these years. It’s still not quite right, not quite proper. It’s still not been long enough to say for sure that the King is dead, and therefore long live the King. But in this place and in the fullness of his mastery, Scott’s every inch the ruler he was born to be, crowned not in gold, but by silver moonlight. Silhouetted against the patch of night sky, with the very faintest roll of thunder diminishing in the distance, Scott looks down upon people smaller and weaker than he is and knows he holds lives in his hands.

Penelope’s pale and ghostly in white and there’s fear in her glistening eyes. Eos is no longer the brightest thing in the room, nestled up against the tabs of John’s collar, clinging to his chest. Scott can see his brother breathing, though his chest rises and falls shallowly, fitful. Half-lidded green eyes still can’t seem to stay open, even as John turns his face away from the light, the gust of fresh air into the room. The library air is still hot and dusty, even as the wind through the window catches the cross-breeze from the stairwell door. 

Scott crosses the room again and bends over his brother. Penelope’s hands are pulled gently away, Eos is forced to flee to the safety of the Princess’ sleeve. John’s nearly as tall as Scott is, but wiry, withering thin. Scott gets his brother’s arm around his shoulders, and it’s not nearly as hard as it should be to heave John upright.

And there’s finally a broken cry of protest, possibly pain, as John fails to stand and falls against his someday-King. Undeterred, Scott’s across the room to the window again, and he deposits John in the chair, nearly dropping him against the back of it. “Sit. Don’t move. Breathe,” he commands.

John does as he’s told, just the same as he always has. His head falls back against the wall behind the chair, and he must not be able to help it, because Scott had told him not to move. He’s still gasping, gulping great deep breaths of the wind off the sea, when Scott first notices the tears leaking from his eyes.

Irrationally, this only feeds the anger burning in his chest. “ _God_ , are you kidding me, John?”

“Please—“ Thickness of emotion strangles whatever John might’ve tried pleading for, but Scott doesn’t want to hear it anyway. He grips the arms of the chair and shakes his head.

“Don’t answer. Cough.” He does, but too weakly. “Cough again—” Better, that time. 

And then, unbidden, speaking his heart instead of his mind, “—don’t _ever_ do that again, John. Do you hear me? Don’t you ever try anything like that again.”

So Scott says. So it shall be. And this time, he believes, for the better.


	4. but remember this, o best beloved

The song of the sea through the broken window is somehow soothing, though waves tear and crash at the foot of the tower, the violence of the sound is softened by the distance. There’s something she’s always loved about the sound of the sea. The hearth is cold and still a mess of crumbled charcoal and singed tapestry. Scott’s long since departed. No one’s brought food or water—John’s servants having been told that their master is having one of those black fits of minor madness—they’ve been warned off by the crown prince.

The bed in the corner of the room is a tangle of sheets and blankets and John and Penelope, the former curled up with his head in the lap of the latter. He’s slept, incapable of much of anything else. She hasn’t, capable of almost everything but. Instead she’s passed the long, dark night in a state of raw exhaustion, shedding quiet tears and carding her fingers gently through John’s hair, rubbing her palms over his back, talking softly about how sorry she is.

Eos should be tending to the library dust, but Penelope expects that there’ll be no tearing her away from John for the next while. She’s tucked herself into the palm of his hand, wrapped her arms tight around the base of his forefinger, and pressed her fierce little face against the bend of the first knuckle.

Penelope has passed the entire night, trying to think of what she’ll say to him. She wants to put it down to exhaustion and a long time spent waiting for the dawn, as though it would make a difference. As though even a princess could possibly know the right words for the morning after a night like the last.

John spares her from the need to fumble through some imperfect sentiment, and wakes without stirring, with no obvious indication that he’s woken up at all, eyes still closed as he asks, soft and faraway, “Do you suppose I’ve gone mad _now_?”

“You haven’t gone mad,” Penelope answers firmly. “Mad people make sense to no one but themselves, and you still make perfect sense to me.” It’s possibly only overnight that it’s happened, but Penelope seems to have grown up just enough not to add a stubborn and childish _So there_ to the end of the statement. As though her word is law. “No one could blame you for feeling the way you do. I don’t. I only wish I’d made sense of you sooner.” She swallows the pressure building at the back of her throat, and manages not to sniffle.

Tension shudders through him and she can feel the restraint, tied up and taut in the muscles beneath her hand, still resting against his back. Eos clambers from his palm up onto his sleeve and starts the climb up his arm to her accustomed place at his collar. She goes ignored, even when a tiny hand stretches up to pat John’s jaw. There’s ferocity, defiance, when John manages, “I’m not sorry.”

This carves another ribbon of pain from Penelope’s heart, though it’s already in more pieces than she knew possible. “I wouldn’t ask you to be. But _I_ am, John, I’m so very sorry for…for not being here. If I could have done more, if I could have done _anything_ —“

“If you meant _that_ , you’d be sorry enough to cut my throat, now that _I_ can’t.”

“ _Oh!_ ” Penelope exclaims, and her fingers fly to her lips to try and stop a sob escaping, but it slips out anyway and threatens to bring her broken heart with it. The bluntness, the bloodiness of the request, the way he says it without a trace of his usual dark, sardonic humor. The way he _means_ it—a princess is always composed, but the library is the one place she had ever felt permitted not to be a princess. Out from underneath the protection of her crown, Penelope shatters into tears.

For having had a teenage girl for a best friend for the better part of the past decade, John’s never been very good with crying. Given that there’s nowhere else for her to go, if Penelope’s crying and she’s in John’s library, usually it’s something he said. It’s hardly the first time, but this time’s different. And if he’s not sorry—and he’s not—then there’s no reason he should want to try and comfort her. Except, as minute after minute stretches past without Penny regaining her composure, he can’t seem to help admitting, “…I shouldn’t have said that.”

“ _No_ , you shouldn’t have,” Penelope agrees, vehemence mustering its way up through her tears. The heat in her voice catches on anger, fans into fire, and though her eyes are still streaming tears, the hands that have been gentle up til now gather fistfuls of his shirt. “You stupid, _stupid_ fool, you utter _coward_ , how _could_ you? “

“You weren’t meant to—“

“Oh, _what_? I wasn’t meant to _what_? To catch you at it? To think of you late at night, to wonder if you were still awake, if you might be lonely? To want your company, because alone and late at night, when I’m afraid for no good reason, I’ve always been able to come and find you. You mean I was _meant_ to wait until morning, meant to come upon you cold and dead and gone, long past anything I might have done. You would have done that to me. You _meant_ to do that to me.”

“Penny…”

“ _Don’t_.” Penelope flares again, shifts herself away and tucks herself into the corner, where the headboard meets the wall. John’s forced to push himself up awkwardly on one elbow and then to sit up, though the movement makes his head swim. Penelope is a tiny little slip of a thing, still more girl than woman, but her blue eyes stare right to the heart of him, bright with furious tears. “I love you. I love you like a brother, and _more_ than a brother, the very dearest friend I’ve ever known, my very best beloved. And you’ve the gall to tell me you still want to die.”

John hasn’t got what it takes for temper any longer. It’s just weary matter of factness that answers, “I can’t help that. Pen, I don’t— _can’t_ —I can’t bear it any longer. The whole Kingdom thinks I went mad. I wish it were true. I wish I had as good a reason as insanity would be, if I have to be locked up, I wish there could at least have been a reason. My brothers— Gordon and Virgil have never known what to say, and they—when they do come, it’s like they’re afraid it’s catching. Like if they stay too long they won’t make it back over the threshold. Nothing they talk to me about is anything that _matters_ any more. And Alan—“ For the first time there’s a break in his voice, “—says he doesn’t mind. Asks if I remember the stars, and if I could help him with his maps. Says he’d stay if I wanted him to, if I was lonely. Says he doesn’t believe what everybody says, about how I rant at the walls and chew paper and bleed ink, says no one _really_ thinks I’ve gone mad, which can only mean that _everyone_ does. Horrid, kind little fool, he says it like he _believes_ it, as though lying makes it better.”

It takes him a long minute to muscle his way past the pain of the lies Alan tells.

“And Scott… Scott’s given so much of himself over to guilt that he _reeks_ of it. I can’t remember the last time he really looked at me. It’s like he thinks if he only sees me from the side and doesn’t think too hard, he can forget he did this to me. Like he wishes I weren’t always here to remind him.”

Penelope’s grown quite still, listening to the way John’s voice cracks, belies the pain below the wearied numbness. “I… I was supposed to be a _warning_. If all I am was a lesson Scott was supposed to learn, then he _hasn’t learned it_ , and there’s no damn point to me. Nothing changed, even after all these years, he still doesn’t understand what kind of power he commands. Because he did it _again_ —he did it again and he did it to _me_ …”

The dam finally breaks beneath the rising pressure of emotion. The sob that tears out of John surprises him more than it does her, because she’s already shifted away from the wall, moved to wrap her arms around him, to pull his face against her shoulder and to let all the anger and frustration and grief wash away, softening into sorrow. All the tension has gone out of him, aside from the occasional tremor of frustration or anger, threatening to surface again.

It doesn’t take long before he’s worn himself out, curled up against her again, desperate for physical contact in the way he almost never is. She keeps her face bowed against his hair, speaks softly and kindly and makes every promise she can think of, tells lie after lie until he falls asleep again, one of his hands fisted in the skirt of her nightdress.

The rumours in the castle hallways have always clung to her like cobwebs, they brush against her skirts as her presence hushes the whispers of passing servants on her way to the library. Filthy, sticky things, spun from next to nothing. Through all of them runs a single thread of truth—that the Princess Penelope loves Prince John, truly and deeply. Beyond her family, she’s never loved anyone half so much. But if true love is meant to be the sort of love that breaks curses, she supposes she must not love him enough.

Perhaps there’s some truth in the rumour that he’s gone mad, if it’s gone so far that he’d say so himself.

She’s watched the sun trace a path across the floor, the patch of sunlight fractured around the jagged edges of the broken windowglass, until he stirs again. This time he doesn’t say anything, just shifts and resettles until he’s resting his head in her lap, still so heavy and sad and tired, and clinging to the hand she offers him. From beneath the curl of his collar, Eos clambers hand over hand to perch on his shoulder, her tiny face somber, though she still swings her feet as she sits, the shimmer of her folded wings belying little twitches of anxiety.

“Why last night?” she asks John, when it seems doesn’t have anything to say. And then, gently,“Did something happen?”

Instead of answering he pulls his fingers from her hand, lifts an upturned palm to his shoulder. Delighted by the attention, Eos flits immediately into the provided place, and drops to her knees to fling her arms around his thumb. It’s such a pure and lovely gesture, full of deep affection, Penelope can’t help but feel tears prickling at her eyes as she smiles.

“Was something Scott said,” he answers, finally, and sounds far away, hollow. “About Eos. That it was a good thing he’d told her to look after me. Bound her to me. I don’t know if he—I doubt he even realized. The Fae are hard to curse, but he’s snared her all the same. And I just...I thought...if I weren’t...if I weren’t around to be bound to, then she could be free.”

He laughs before she can even react to that, and it’s a bitter, grey husk of a sound. “God. It’s not as though—she’s a tiny, daft little thing. Heart’s bigger than her brain, and the way they feel—it’s nothing complicated. I doubt she could fathom anything as subtle as a curse. They _live_ to be given tasks—their souls are made of pure purpose, they can’t exist unless there’s a reason that they should; rusting nails or blowing dust or dotting dew on rose petals—it may as well be true that she’d be here anyway. Was _her_ library before it was ever mine. But...just...the notion that she could be free. _Should_ be free.” He starts to shrug but it turns into a shudder, even as Eos starts to mince across the palm of his hand, distracted by some airy little dance, possibly meant to amuse and cheer him up, setting about her appointed task.

“And you thought you should die to free her?”

“I thought I should die so that we both might be free.”

For as long as he’s spent in a library, for as well as he’s read and as clever as he is, sometimes John is frightfully stupid. “You’re not at fault for what’s fallen over her,” she tells him, fiercely, and love swells inside her—the sort that must break curses. Because John’s not to blame for this, not for any of it. “And yet that was your impulse, that your only freedom waits in death, and by your hand the rest of it would fall away?”

“I don’t see how else.” There’s another short bark of frustrated laughter and this time he shakes his hand, brushes Eos away to hover in midair. He pushes himself to sit up, as rumpled and worn as the bedclothes they’ve both spent the long night and half the day nestled amongst. Something seems to settle over him again, the weight of some truth; some deep resignation. “It’s not as though it matters. I won’t do it again.” And then, bitter, “Can’t ever do it again. My life’s as much a prison as my library.”

“It needn’t be,” Penelope says, though she knows that what she’ll say next is something she could only ever say to someone she loves as much as John. Though if he doesn’t love her equally, what follows might be her death. Impulse has her reach out to clasp his hands, and then she says, “If you’re so unhappy as to wish to die, then I shall kill your brother.”

John’s hand jerks away from hers immediately, he recoils as his eyes widen, his voice harshens with sharp disbelief, “Don’t say that!”

There’s a strange curl of vindictive pleasure to seeing him so obviously horrified, after what he’d put her through the night before, and would have been willing to put her through in the morning they share now. So she straightens up and lifts her face, defiant. “Why not?”

No one’s crossed the threshold, there’s no one else in the library. He still throws the curtain around the bed back, scouring the room for anyone who might’ve heard, finds it empty. But there’s still fear written in his eyes as he turns to her again, warning, “It’s _treason_. Penelope, don’t _ever_ —”

“Your brother might one day command me, John, but you never shall. So few people know the truth of him, and now it’s plainer than ever that the truth is a danger to those subject to him. I’m to be a queen one day, a protector and a ruler of _my_ people, and this is the threat that waits across the sea?”

“He’s not—”

“Why would you defend him?” she demands, careless of the way her tone rings to the high ceiling, the way it makes John shrink away, his eyes darting to the door, still closed. “When he’s done this to you, when you so dearly wish to die, why would you want to stop me? If it would take freedom to save your life, then—”

“He’s my _brother_. He’s...Gods, Penelope, he’s the heir apparent, the crown prince, it would be tantamount to _regicide_.” He drops his voice when he says it, as though the words are enough to summon the castle guards, to tear her down and throw her to the sword. “Penelope, you _couldn’t_.”

She tosses her hair over her shoulders at this, her blue eyes cold like frost. “Couldn’t I?” she challenges. “Poison his wine cup. Some tragic accident in the woods. He wanted to run the hounds with Virgil and I yesterday, wouldn’t have been so hard to lead him from the path.” Penelope’s hands flit to her heart, and she adopts a theatrical tone, “Dear Scott, please, just a few minutes to bathe my feet in the stream. Oh, do come hold my hand, I should hate to fall and soil my dress. _Do_ go carefully, dearest prince, the stones in the creekbed are _hard_ and _sharp_. I should hate for you to _fall_.”

She can see now that she’s hurting him, the way his eyes are bright again. “Penelope, _stop_ ,” he protests weakly.

“Don’t tell me you’ve never thought it,” she challenges.

“Never,” he answers, vehement. “He’s _my brother_ , and...and he was a child. He was just a stupid selfish child and he’s...he’s as trapped as I am, by every word he says. He doesn’t mean it, he _never meant it_ and...if...if nothing else, he’s always tried to do what’s best. There wasn’t malice in what he said last night just—just that I...that he didn’t want...”

“Didn’t want you to die? When he’s already as good as killed you? And he _knows it_ , because you weigh on his conscience. He said so last night, said that—”

“ _Stop_.”

It’s not the command in his voice that stops her, but the fear, the way his hands grab her shoulders and give her a sharp, rough shake. His voice still barely passes above a hushed whisper as he pleads with her, “ _Stop_ , Penelope, you can’t say these things. You’ve said them to me and what if he compels me to repeat them? _Please_. No more, Penny, please. It’s my fault, not his. He was right in what he told me. I was—it’s true, what they say; that I...that I’ve started to...that I lost my mind. Please. Please...go. Go, leave me. Don’t ever speak of this again. You—”

Before he can protest further, there’s a crisp, sharp knock on the door, five loud strikes. Everyone but Penelope knocks on the library door before they enter, but only one person knocks like that.

The hands clasping her shoulders go limp, drop to his sides. His eyes go blank and glassy and lost. John already looks terrible, pale and wan and dishevelled with emotion, but Penelope hadn’t imagined he could look worse. For as badly as he’d scared her last night, she realizes now that she might just be scaring him worse, and feels more like a girl and less like a princess than ever, having just raised the notion of a threat against John’s brother; who, for better or worse, will one day be John’s king.

And as the door swings open and Prince Scott crosses the threshold—for the first time, Penelope realizes she might do well to be afraid of him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> chapter title is a line from Samuel R. Delaney's "Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones"


	5. would that wishes were curses

For as hot as the room was last night, now as the last of morning gives way to afternoon, the breeze through the high tower has left it cold. Wind gusts and whistles through the window, and teases at the heavy curtains that hang around the bed in the corner.

Scott doesn’t know if he should have been here sooner, or if he was right to wait. Before he can say anything, he’s arrested by the sight of his brother. For as beautiful as Penelope was the night previous—and is yet this morning, kneeling amongst the bed clothes beside Scott brother, her expression so perfectly still and solemn that she seems almost a statue—by the light of day, John looks ghastly.

He’s pale and drawn and plainly exhausted, his hair tousled and his clothes from the night before hanging off him, loose at his narrow shoulders and wrinkled. And he speaks before Scott can say anything, his voice harsh and hushed and _demanding_. “Make her leave.”

Scott blinks at him, startled. Because if there’s one thing John’s ever asked for, it’s Penelope’s company. No one envies John anything about his situation, except perhaps that it’s earned him the grace and pity of someone as kind and lovely as the Princess, whose expression breaks like glass at John’s words. Her hands go to his, but he’s already shaking his head, even as she implores, “John, dearest—”

“ _No_ ,” he hisses, and this time time he jerks his hands away and then his palms hit her shoulders and he shoves her, _viciously_. His expression twists again and his voice rises in anger, bubbling and bleeding out of him even as she recoils, starts to scramble away from him. “No, _no_ , get _out_! Scott, make her _go_!”

Scott has to snap himself out of disbelief at the sudden change in his brother; startled that John’s been moved to something that looks like violence—almost looks like _madness_. Penelope is startled, fearful, and the skirt of her nightgown is pinned beneath John’s knee and she falls to the floor with a gasp and a yelp of pain as she attempts to climb off the bed. Scott’s at her side in an instant, catches her by the elbows and lifts her easily to her feet, pulls her back and puts himself between her and John. “Hey—”

The sound that tears out of his brother now is some sort of cross between fear and pain, and it _sounds_ like madness, even as John crumples to his side in the tangle of blankets and starts to sob. Scott’s blood freezes and Penelope’s hands seize around his arm, and he knows— _knows_ —that he mustn’t say anything, mustn’t risk issuing another command born from thoughtless fear, from the terror of seeing his brother like this.

Instead he turns and takes Penelope’s hand, pulls her to the threshold. He’s careful to be gentle, because he can feel her trembling. He thinks the sentence through three times before he says, low and urgent, “I think it might be best if you left.”

At some point she’s started crying again and her free hand goes to dash tears from her eyes, and is damp when she grasps his hand. “Please. Oh, please help him, please, Scott. I don’t—whatever he tells you, I—I didn’t mean to...”

Scott shakes his head, attempts a reassuring smile, even as he guides her through the doorway. “John’s not himself. I’ll...I will see to him, Penelope. We’ll figure this out. Please, I do really think you should go. You might go to your chambers, you might wish to take some rest, last night was...was trying. For all of us. I’ll calm him down.”

“But I...”

“Penelope, please.” He doesn’t specify. He’s very careful not to specify. But she needs to go.

And she does. He hears her steps quicken on the stairs, wishes he’d warned her to go carefully, but it doesn’t matter. Scott closes the door behind her and turns to fall against it, feeling heavy and full of guilt, dread. Across the room, John’s still trembling, weeping, and Scott just has to stand and let the sound wash over him, has to let it sink in and stain every part of him; his own shabby empathy only a pale imitation of all the pain he’s caused his brother.

Eventually he finds himself drawn across the room, to sit on the floor next to the bed, leaning his shoulder against the edge of the mattress, and not saying anything. John’s gone quiet again, though Scott can still him breathing, shaky, shuddering sounds. Scott wonders if his brother’s going to feel the word of command behind every breath he draws, from now until the last breath he takes. If by grasping John’s shoulders and leaning over him and saying the word “ _Breathe_ ”, Scott has stolen the mastery of the very air in John’s lungs. His own face is wet as he finally musters the courage to reach over, to lay a hand on his brother’s back. “John, I’m sorry,” he whispers.

There’s no answer, and Scott’s eleven years old again, wondering how he could possibly have done something so careless, so _horrible_. His fingers tighten in the course fabric of John’s shirt, damp with sweat to spite the coldness of the air. If it weren’t for the sound of his breathing, the warmth still in him—Scott would almost swear there’s no life left in his brother. Maybe there isn’t. Not a life that could mean anything. He’s gone limp and still and curled himself up, facing the wall.

He doesn’t know what he’s supposed to say. There aren’t words for a moment like this, and all he seems able to do is to rub the palm of his hand and the tense, hard place between John’s shoulder blades, wishing like anything that there were a way to break the curse. Scott’s certain of nothing but the fact that he’s far too young for this—but then, if _he’s_ too young, then John, one year younger, must be too.

None of it’s fair, but the worst of it is so terribly cruel; that it had only been by deep, deep love that Scott had brought his brother back from the brink of death, but that only by his hand that it had even been necessary.

It seems to take hours, but it’s not really that long at all before he thinks of something to say. Haltingly, hesitant, so careful with his words, he starts, “Johnny, I’m not...I will never ask you to forgive me—” the stringency of the language makes it sound so formal, so stern, but this crumbles away as his voice breaks again “—but if there were ever anything I could do... _anything_. Please, John, please just ask me. Anything I could offer you, I’d do it. I’d try. If you...if you wanted, I’d renounce the crown. If you want never to see me again, I’ll leave. I’ll go where I can do no further harm, let the reign fall—f-fall to Virgil, o-or Gordon. Anyone else. Anyone would be better than me. I know I can’t fix it, but if I could make it up—I-I would try to do anything you asked, John, I swear it. John?”

John shivers and Scott wants to push himself up and throw his arms around his brother, wants them both to be children again, wants this mistake to be one he didn’t make in the fullness of his understanding of his curse. Instead, beneath the palm of Scott’s hand, John shifts and groans at the effort of the movement, starts to push himself up. Scott scrambles to his feet and impulse has him step back, as his brother unfolds his long limbs and manages to get to the edge of the bed, to stand, though he sways dizzily and Scott has to catch his arm.

Scott expects his brother to shrug his hand off, to pull away, but instead he leans in and Scott can feel him shaking, can tell that he needs the help as he says, “My desk. Please.”

Scott obliges immediately, silently, helps his brother shuffle the short distance to the heavy oaken chair behind the massive amount of real estate that’s occupied by John’s big mahogany desk. The top is cluttered with papers and ink, the corners are stacked high with books, and as Scott helps his brother take his seat, the redhead seems especially pale and fragile, flanked by richly coloured leather and dark wood, stone walls behind him, and the daylight through the window washing him out.

“What...what should I...”

“The bookcase in the back, the high shelf. Next to the cloche, there’s a letter. For Penny.”

 _The last letter you ever meant to write_ , Scott realizes grimly, though he goes to retrieve it. He expects it to feel heavier than it does, thick parchment and black ink, and John’s familiar scrawl. He’s tall enough to fetch it down easily, struck by the mental image of John, placing it carefully on the very same shelf. Scott crosses the room with his burden, bears it in both hands, and handles it as though he expects it to ignite. He stops, standing in front of John’s desk, his brother leaning heavily on his elbows and his green eyes bright, intense and feverish as he sits in judgement.

And then says the last thing Scott wants to hear, “Read it.”

The envelope is sealed with a blob of wax—red, Scott imagines, would have been more apt, but John’s letters have always been sealed with bright cerulean. The ring on his finger has left a heavy, curlicued J imprinted in the wax, and Scott threads his thumb beneath the flap of the envelope and tugs.

He doesn’t try very hard, reluctant to break the seal, dreads the contents of the letter and the way he’ll be made to feel. And maybe it takes longer than it should, because he glances up at the creak of the drawer and John, withdrawing a long, slender blade; though even just a letter opener looks evil and sinister in his pale fingers as he holds it out, hilt first. “Maybe this would have worked better,” John says, and the double meaning is implicit in the softness of his voice, the way his eyes burn, bright and green and unnatural in the sunlight, like some wicked, poisonous magic is working behind them.

The word _madness_ whispers in Scott’s brain again, as he takes the blade from his brother’s noticeably steady hand. He swallows as he slits the edge of the envelope, tips the contents into his hand, and slowly unfolds the parchment.

It’s simple. Concise. It’s not a long read and John watches, impassive, though Scott’s eyes blur before the end of it, and tears smear the ink on the paper, once, twice. It trembles in his hand by the time he finishes and his fingers clench around the hilt of the letter opener, jewels and filigreed silver rough against his palm, biting deep into his skin. “I’m sorry,” he stammers again, but can’t lift his head to face his brother, even as he hears the feet of the chair scrape backwards against the stone and John gets to his feet again. “John, I’m _sorry_ , I’m so sorry, I never knew. I never knew you felt this way, that...th-that you’d come to feel this way. If anything I could have done—I’ll tear this tower down. I’ll tear the whole castle apart, ‘til there’s no library left for you to be trapped in, I-I—”

“Wouldn’t work,” John says softly, with the certainty of someone who’s tried. “You broke the window, but I can’t go out it, and it’s more than I ever could have done. You could tear away every other stone, but you’d be balked by the patch I stand upon. And then I’d just stand, forever, because I can no longer fall. No, Scott. You can’t do that.”

“Then _what_?” Scott has to exhale, hard, and then draw a great, heaving breath to steady his voice, to master himself enough to plead with his brother, “What can I do, John? Please. Please, please I would ask that you might tell me. Anything. I’ll do _anything_ to make this easier on you.”

“No,” John answers, and he still stands, though Scott can see the way one of his hands hasn’t left the desktop, the way he leans his weight against it. “You won’t.”

“I’d try.”

“I’ll prove it,” John answers, almost blithely, and Scott has to force himself to hold his ground as his brother comes out from around his desk. John stops to stand only just in front of him, still unsteady and bright-eyed and mad, mad, mad. He’s not well and it’s more obvious than ever, this close. He’s been to the very edge of death and Scott can see how it’s shaken him, how it’s left him hollowed out and empty of anything but the basest, blackest impulse. His brother doesn’t sound anything like his brother as he continues, “Three wishes is traditional, I think. But you won’t do what I ask. I _know_ you won’t. In the end I’ll be lucky to get one, and not what I want most.”

The air in the room feels icy, the breeze seems to slice through the layers of Scott’s jerkin, the doublet beneath, freezing right to the heart of him. John’s still in a plain linen shift, wool breaches. Scott can see the paleness of his skin, the ridges of his collarbone beneath, but his brother seems utterly unfazed by the cold. “You might ask me,” Scott hazards, careful not to make it an order. And then, damning his caution, because he wants the truth. “John, ask me for what you want."

But then his brother’s fingertips pluck at the fabric of Scott’s sleeve, above the hand that still holds the knife, and regret shocks through Scott, sharp and horrid, even before John says, softly and simply—

“Mercy.”

Even if he has gone mad, it’s a damnable, _damning_ truth about Scott’s brother that he’s always, _always_ right. Because immediately, instantly, Scott answers, “ _No._ ”

And John laughs at him, high and thin and exhausted lifting his hands and three slender fingers, counting the first of them down as he says, “One.”

Scott’s horrified, frightened to the point that he wants to flee, but it’s like he’s been rooted to the spot by his brother’s request. His voice seems to come from far away, seems feeble and faint as he protests, “John, I could _never_ —”

“No more than I could,” John answers sharply. “But you asked what I wanted.”

He had. He had, and it’s his own fault that he’d gone as far as to demand an answer, because now John’s not going to be able to help but tell the truth, even if it might be kinder—might be merciful—to lie. Scott steels himself and prompts John to continue, “There _has_ to be something—”

Before Scott can finish, John’s already got his answer waiting, and this time there’s a faint gleam of hope in his eyes, meeting Scott’s gaze, as he says, “Peace.”

“Peace,” Scott echoes, and his heart leaps at the thought that maybe that’s something he can do, maybe that’s something achievable. Peace. He’s not sure what John means, exactly, but it sounds so much gentler, after his brother would ask for something as cruel as mercy. “Peace,” he repeats again, and then stammers, “What...w-what do you mean?”

His hands move instinctively to catch his brother as John shivers suddenly, his knees starting to give out. It’s not even been twelve hours since Scott was here last, and his brother had barely been able to breathe, had been moments away from death. Scott’s not sure how John’s even standing, because he’s trembling now, and Scott keeps hold of his forearms to steady him, wants never to have to see him fallen, ever again. He wishes he could explain that that’s the only reason why he’d said what he had, last night. _Breathe, John_. It goes unspoken. Doesn’t need to be said.

This time John’s voice breaks and Scott wants to pull him tight into an embrace, pull all the sorrow out of him as he pleads, “Tell me to be happy here. Please. Please, tell me this is what I want. All I’ll ever want. _Peace_ , Scott. I’d give anything for a little peace.”

Impossibly, it’s crueler than the word mercy.

Because it would be so simple. Scott would have to be a greater fool than anyone—even John—has ever imagined, not to have at least _thought_ of it. It’s a deep, desperate wish, and would be a mercy of a sweeter, truer kind. A mercy on John’s mind and his heart and his soul, and the rest of his sad, profoundly lonely life.

_You’re happy here, John. There’s nowhere else you could wish to be. You’ve forgotten anything that ever troubled you. And you’re safe and this is your home, and it’s where you’ll belong. And you’ll be just as glad to spend the rest of your life here, as you would be if you were free. Peace, John, just be at peace._

But it’s not what he says.The only words he ever seems to choose carefully are the words he mustn’t say. They spring, eager and sweet, to the tip of his tongue, but Scott shakes his head and says, “No."

John's laugh is soft now and he challenges his brother, "Everyone says I lost my mind. You may as well take that, too."

That hurts. It sends a keening ache into Scott's chest, but he shakes his head again. "No...I can’t. John, I couldn’t. It...you don’t know what you’re asking, y-you’d be...worse than dead. It’d be worse than seeing you dead, Johnny, it’d be seeing you _wrong_. False. It would make a puppet out of you, if I ever told you what to think or feel...or...or do,” he concludes weakly, though he’s done the last so many times already, so often without ever meaning to. “I’m sorry. I’m _sorry_ , John, I know you—”

“Knew you’d say no,” John corrects him, interrupting again. He has what’s almost a glimmer of triumph in his grin, though it doesn’t reach his eyes. The light seems to be dimming out of them and he shudders, shivering again. There’s a faint groan and then whatever’s held him up so far seems to give way. Scott’s already there to catch him.

It’s too much, Scott realizes blackly. Even if it’s all been under his own initiative, John’s pushing himself too hard. Before John can rally, rouse himself to protest, Scott’s got his arm around his shoulders again, and has hauled him the short distance across the library, back to bed.

He pretends that he’s a good big brother, as he settles John back down, straightens the blankets and props a pillow or two beneath his head, fluffs it up beneath his shoulders. John doesn’t stop him, doesn’t raise the slightest hint of protest. Something like resignation seems to weigh him down, and he’s closed his eyes by the time Scott has him settled.

“Two,” John says softly, before Scott can ask if he’s all right, if he’s feeling any better.

“I’m sorry,” Scott says again, after a long, hollow silence. He knows it’s not wanted, but his hand still goes to his brother’s shoulder. “John, I am. I’m so sorry.”

“I know.” A pause. “It doesn’t help.”

Scott swallows. “I know that, too. But...Gods, John. Please, don’t tell me there’s nothing I can do. There must be something. Three wishes, you said, I might ask that you would tell me the third. If you want to hurt me with it too, then—then that’s fine. I-If you want...want the only thing that _could_ free you then...th-then maybe I might be strong enough for that. For the window, for the blade, for _me_ ; and then the crown, for you. If you could live with it, then I—”

John’s eyes snap open at that, as though it’s taken him a minute to catch up to what Scott’s just said. “No,” he answers, vehement. “ _No_ , never. Never that, I couldn’t—I said, I _just_ said; I couldn’t want that any more than _you_ could. You’re my brother, Scott. A-and—Scotty, I don’t...I don’t hate you. I’ve never hated you. You were a child, and it was a mistake. I know that.” He sighs and his gaze breaks from Scott’s, and he stares up at the ceiling, blank again. His eyes fall closed again and he sounds distant, defeated when he speaks, “It’s just that I’m so tired, Scott. I’m so very, _very_ tired. And I don’t want to be here anymore.”

He can’t apologize again, knowing it means nothing. He can only try and understand, try and hope that knowing something deep and dark and true about his brother will help temper his impulse in the end. And now, hesitant, he asks, “...what was the third thing? Three wishes, you said, though you only hoped for one. Will you tell me?”

In the moments that pass, stretching out with the rhythm of John’s breathing, Scott wonders if his brother’s fallen asleep again. Though it will never be the match of the mercy or the peace John would wish for, maybe after everything he’s been through, sleep is the best that Scott could ask. He moves his hand to squeeze his brother’s fingers, but before he can, John has his answer.

“Wisdom,” he says, though it comes out as soft as his breath. “Learn the lesson, Scott. For the rest of my life, I’ll be an example of the worst of what you can do. You’re my brother, and I love you, but I’ll always be afraid. I’m never not going to fear you, because I _know_ the worst you’re capable of. Try to learn to understand that.”

“I will,” Scott answers immediately, and seizes John’s fingers, squeezes them tight to make the promise. “I can do that. John, I swear, it’ll never happen again, I’ll—”

“You’ll try.”

“I—yeah.” Abashed, Scott nods, even as John shifts beneath the blankets and pulls his hands away, tucks them to his chest as he rolls over to face the wall. “I guess I can’t promise you more than that.”

He’s not sure if John has anything further to say. He doesn’t comment on Scott’s attempt to make a pact with him, to swear that from here on he’ll be his best. If the lack of faith stings, Scott supposes he deserves it. He stays sitting at the edge of the bed, even after John’s breathing evens out and deepens again. He stays for long enough to watch the square of light on the floor creep to the edge of the carpet before the fireplace, before he shakes himself out of his stupor and rises to his feet.

He straightens his jacket, shrugs his shoulders beneath it. It probably hasn’t been that long since he sent Penelope away. He should go find her. She’ll be shaken, the poor thing, and desperately afraid for John. He owes it to his brother to go to her, to reassure the Princess that somehow it’ll all come to be all right again.

Scott glances back to his brother, and it’s to his credit that he really does believe that he’ll do his best to heed to wisdom. That he’s learned his lesson, even if the price is almost unbearably high. He has no way of knowing—no reason to suspect—that not an hour from now, he’ll have brought the full weight of an order to bear on Gordon, and sent the second youngest away to sea.

As he leaves the library, Scott’s brazen enough for a moment of foolish, desperate hope.


End file.
